OMAP 4470 faster than Tegra 3, claims Amazon

Yesterday Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed three new Kindle tablets, including 7- and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablets, and he briefly mentioned that the great processor and graphics engine behind both tablets comes courtesy Texas Instruments.

The 8.9-incher uses the OMAP 4470, while the Kindle Fire HD is apparently based on the OMAP 4460, with slower graphics.

Last time we checked the OMAP 4470 was a 45nm dual A9 core that works somewhere between 1.5GHz and 1.8GHz, comes with hardware accelerated 2D and 3D and supports 1080p in both 2D and 3D video. The graphics core of choice is a PowerVR SGX544, clocked at 384MHz and a dual channel 32bt 466MHz LPDDR2 memory support. The OMAP 4460 features SGX 540 graphics.

According to Jeff Bezos the new Kindle Fire HD and Texas instrument OMAP 4470 can do 12 billion floating point operations per second while Tegra 3 can do only 8 billion, claiming that OMAP 4470 can do 50 percent more. Furthermore OMAP 4470 has 7.5GB/s memory bandwidth or some 40 percent more than 5.3GB/s on the Tegra 3.

This is supposed to make Kindle Fire faster than in HD content. Jeff Bezos also praised the smooth software integration that Amazon’s developers worked into the Kindle Fire.

It will be interesting to put the performance claims to the test and pit the new Kindles against Qualcomm S4 and Tegra 3 based devices.